How much time do kids REALLY spend with media?

You may be asking yourself, how much time do kids really spend with media anyway? I mean, there may be some negative messages out there, but kids don’t really get exposed to them that often, right?

WRONG! In fact, a recent survey from The Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids between the ages of 8-18 spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes engaged with media everyday. Yes, you read that right. That’s almost 11 hours a day! Now, that stat is actually referring to multitasking media. The average when you count the hours without adding in the amount of time a child is using more than one type of media is closer to 8 hours a day.

But, that’s still a lot of time. In fact, one interesting thought to consider is that, on average, your child isn’t spending that much time a day with anyone or anything else! So, if you wonder if media is really influencing children, the answer is, yes. There’s no way that we can spend that amount of time engaged with something and it not impact us in some way. We’ll look at how media impacts children and adolescents in the next post.